1 Content Introduction

2.2 New England in Frost's work 
Frost's personal life was also meager, although dramatic in its own way . A 
few important and almost always tragic events (difficult courtship of a future wife, 
suicide attempt after her first refusal, death of her first child) are played out in 
verse many times. And at the same time, the complete absence of love lyrics in the 
traditional sense of the word is striking - at least in youth. Probably, Frost’s late 
love for his long-term assistant and secretary was also dramatic (of course, after 
the death of his wife after thirty years of marriage; Frost was a man of strict rules): 
having rejected the poet’s courtship, or rather, refusing to part with her husband for 
the sake of the marriage proposed by him, she was friends with the poet and 
worked for him until his death. Frost did not participate in the world wars, was 
neither a drunkard nor a drug addict, he lived in solitude, which he perceived as 
desertion and which, apparently, was not burdened at all
1
. 
1
Фрост Р.,Топорище, Жена Поля Баньяна (пер.А.Я.Сергеева).- Новый мир, 1965, № 12, с.90-95. 

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A curious psychological touch - Frost never wrote poems in fresh wake as a 
direct emotional response to a particular event, but only after a long - sometimes 
many years - pause, allowing the feeling (or feelings) to distill and settle. 
Frost published his first book in England, became famous in America; for 
decades, his poems and himself were perceived on both sides of the ocean in 
completely different ways. For the British, he was a late, perhaps the last romantic, 
for the Americans - a realist, faithful to the "truth of life" - from specific features of 
the landscape to recognizable characters. There was some justification for both 
approaches, although both now seem simplistic. Frost should be recognized as an 
existentialist poet (or stoic poet, which, by the way, means about the same thing), 
who found a vaguely atheistic (or pantheistic) key to overcoming the horror of 
being. At the same time, dualism is inherent in Frost's work - not only 
philosophical, but also formal. And it is worth dwelling on this formal dualism in 
an attempt to link it with philosophical dualism. 
Throughout his creative life, Frost wrote both rhymed and blank verse. The 
rhymed ones were, as a rule, small in size and traditional in form, the white ones 
sometimes numbered many hundreds of lines. Looking ahead, we note that the 
glory of his Frost I am indebted to five or six rhymed poems that appear in every 
anthology of English-language poetry, and to all whites without exception. 
Frost's blank verse is written in the form of a dramatic monologue (or 
sometimes dialogue) that goes back to the 19th-century English poet Robert 
Browning, who in turn studied with Shakespeare. Sometimes we have a 
monologue of the author (lyrical hero), sometimes - a character, sometimes - a 
dialogue or consecutive monologues of several characters. The same Brodsky 
mastered Frost's technique in a number of poems, the first of which should be 
called "Dedicated to Yalta." The image of the narrator, the circumstances of the 
place, time and mode of action, finally, the story told or discussed in the poem 
does not appear immediately; often the reader does not understand at first what is 
at stake, and sometimes - as in the famous "Fear" or in the "Black Cottage" that 
was not included in our collection - he remains, if not in ignorance, then in half-

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knowledge, remains in doubt . The reader hesitates, like Prince Hamlet, and 
harboring suspicions, and not daring to be imbued with them to the end. But the 
same doubts, the same half-knowledge or, if you like, half-knowledge - the basic 
premise of the philosophy of existentialism, to which Frost came spontaneously 
and in any case without reading either the French existentialists or the German 
ones. However, Frost does not reach the doubt about the resources of language as a 
means of cognition (doubts anticipated by Fyodor Tyutchev and actualized 
primarily by the "Frankfurt school") : the uttered thought does not become a lie for 
him, but falls into the ambiguous position of incomplete truth. And to get to the 
truth... no, you won't, but no one bothers you to look for a clue, develop a 
hypothesis, intuitively feel for something important... Today we can call Frost's 
poetry interactive - moreover, we can recognize interactivity as one of its main 
advantages . 
And, of course, the magic of poetry. Does it get lost in translation? Frost 
with us they printed a lot, but translated little, not everyone who should have 
translated it was translated, and those who should not have translated Frost were 
also translated. In this edition, many of Frost's key verses are presented in two 
translations - and the reader himself is able to trace the angle of divergence, and is 
able to build a virtual third at the junction of two translations. And Frost's most 
famous poem - "In the Forest on a Snowy Evening" - is here completely separated 
into a special section "An Anthology of One Poem". Reading the translations of 
this poem, special attention should be paid to the last two lines, or rather, the same 
one, but repeated twice. 
"Long miles to go before I fall asleep, 
Long miles to go before I fall asleep" 
(Interlinear translation) 
For the first time, this ingenuous line has a specific meaning, the second 
time it has a metaphorical one, in the aggregate the concrete and metaphorical 
meanings are added up to a metaphysical one. The same is true (although perhaps 
not so clearly) with all the poetry of Robert Frost . 

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The USA is not a country of poetry lovers. For the average American, a 
person, especially a man who is fond of poetry, is something incomprehensible, 
alien, almost hostile. However, the attitude of Americans towards their poets 
changes when recognition comes to them, expressed in circulation, titles and 
university sinecures. At the same time, it is not clear how a poet can live up to such 
success - to form and establish himself, dragging out a marginal existence. But it's 
happening. 
Robert Frost - the largest American poet of the 20th century - fully tasted 
obscurity and hardships in the first half of his life and fame, almost the official 
status of a national Bard - in the second. During World War II, more than a million 
leaflets were distributed in the American army with Frost's life-affirming poem 
"Come in!" He was a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, spoke at presidential 
inaugural ceremonies more than once, was a goodwill ambassador, his poems were 
included in school anthologies ... Truly, for the United States, Frost was "more 
than a poet." 
Now, almost half a century after his death, such publicity and " hype " of 
Frost's name may seem excessive. However, as the 20th century passes into the 
past and the true scale of the various peaks on its literary map becomes clearer, the 
poetic pinnacle called "Robert Frost " does not shrink at all. The point is not only 
that Frost had a poetic gift, and his best poems have not lost their charm at all. 
There is something very special in Frost's poetry - a fusion of the national, even 
emphatically local, with the universal, modern with the eternal. Frost seems to 
have taken the secret of this alloy, which was worked out in a "crucible" of very 
personal experiences, with him. 
Frost's comparison with Chinese and Japanese poets. There is no evidence 
that Frost was fond of or even got acquainted with oriental poetry, but this 
indifference to the change of places and the ability to extract all the necessary 
spiritual food from what you see around him really makes him related to oriental 
lyricists and sages. (When one such sage was asked where the " dao " - the path - 
was, he replied that the dao runs from this village to the neighboring one.) 

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The opinion about the simplicity, accessibility of Frost's poetry is also a 
delusion . The illusion of simplicity arises from the fact that in Frost's poems there 
is always the foreground - material, plot, often completely unsophisticated. But 
behind the first plan there are other plans and meanings, which are not only not 
simple, but are often obscured, encrypted. 
Frost 's poem can be inspired by any episode of everyday life. Often this is 
work - mowing, repairing a wall, clearing a spring, caring for a calf. Maybe - and 
even simpler, something seen: a dried-up stream, trees swaying in the autumn wind 
outside the window, the edge of a snow-covered winter forest ... And every time 
Frost discovers philosophical depth and ambiguity behind this routine. 
A large part of Frost's work is large (hundreds of lines) plot works written in 
traditional English poetry in blank verse and bordering on the genre of poetic 
dramas. However, perhaps the most valuable part of Frost's legacy is made up of 
small poems, many of which have an exquisite rhythmic pattern and rhyme, 
combined with simple and natural colloquial speech, in which Frost's philosophy 
appears in the most concentrated form. 
Frost's philosophy is a wise, stoic acceptance of life, with all its hardships, 
disappointments and the horror of death at the end. Man is weak, and Frost the man 
at times succumbs to despondency, even despair, but Frost the poet in the end is 
always on the side of life. 
In our country, until the end of the 1950s, only a narrow circle of translators 
and literary critics-Americanists knew about Frost . An explosion of interest in the 
American Bard occurred in 1962, when the 88-year-old Frost visited the USSR. 
This trip, which took place at the height of the Cold War, was organized at the 
official level as a step of peaceful diplomacy. It was planned that then A. 
Tvardovsky would visit the United States , but this return visit did not take place. 
Frost was enthusiastic about his mission. He was not fond of communism, 
but was a man of democratic convictions and possessed an independent mind, free 
from the frenzy of militant patriotism, which then seized both warring parties. 
Having met in the USSR with Khrushchev, whom he liked for his energy and 

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integrity, Frost tried to convince the Soviet leader to accept some rules of peaceful 
rivalry with the United States, a code of mutual respect for antagonists, in order to 
rid the world of every minute nuclear danger. 
In addition to Khrushchev, Frost met in Moscow and Leningrad with the 
Soviet literary elite, about which he had no idea before: A. Akhmatova, A. 
Tvardovsky, K. Paustovsky, K. Chukovsky, I. Ehrenburg, E. Yevtushenko
1
. 
In 1963 a collection of Russian translations from Frost was published . Since 
then, Frost has been translated a lot. The most famous are the translations of I. 
Kashkin , V. Toporov , A. Sergeev, B. Khlebnikov, G. Kruzhkov, S. Stepanov. 
However, although good translators were engaged in Frost , and they put their soul 
and all their skill into this work, Frost remains not fully mastered on Russian soil - 
in the decisive sense that in the original language he is sincerely and passionately 
loved by readers, and his translations are such the well-deserved love of Russian 
readers has not yet won. There is no doubt that the translation and reading works 
on the Russian comprehension of Robert Frost will continue. 
1
Грязнов А.Ф. Философия "Шотландской школы". М.,МГУ, 1979, 125 с. 

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